Month: May 2016

Twilio filed their highly anticipated S1 yesterday, which was available to search, annotate and analyze instantly on Sentieo. Our analyst was able to build a quick 3 statement model in under 15 minutes, available below.– WhatsApp is 15% of revenue, but the breadth of customers disclosed has surprised commentators, including Nordstrom $JWN. We show how this has been known for over a year, and how a broader ecosystem list could have been generated months ago using Sentieo, yielding interesting clients like Salesforce $CRM, partners like 8×8 $EGHT, landlords like Boston Properties $BXP and listed, lesser known competitors like GINSMS $GOK:CN and Xura $MESG. – Many research processes, from pulling out $TWLO financials to building a notebook from web clips of external articles can be done in a single click. – Twilio’s wide competition can be tracked and aggregated, and show a surprising trend in recent months that will be worth investigating.

Rather than discussing the IPO dynamics which will certainly be difficult in this tech-unfriendly IPO environment, we wanted to spend some time walking users through how they can even diligence non-public companies using Sentieo. In particular, we will highlight three of our products: DocSearch, Web Clipper, and Mosaic.

SAN FRANCISCO and NEW YORK, May 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Today two brothers, Alap and Naman Shah, unveiled Sentieo, a powerful equity research platform that arms financial analysts with new ways to quickly search, visualize, and interpret data allowing them to do deeper, faster research, spot business inflections earlier, and generate better returns.

Sentieo has been quietly building momentum for over three years leading up to today’s official launch, offering a lightning fast, thoughtfully designed web and app based interface developed by Sentieo’s team of 40 engineers, which is already speeding up the workflow of more than 60 clients. Sentieo’s clients include two of the top ten hedge funds, as well as numerous top mutual funds, investment banks, financial advisors, research houses, and corporate development departments.

Sentieo is first and foremost a search engine, focusing its natural language processing (NLP) and deep semantic search technology on an exhaustive database of global financial documents. Users can instantly search SEC filings, transcripts, broker research, and news to find key text and data. Users may then pull data using Sentieo’s table extraction technology and highlight and annotate key text and figures on the fly. All work performed on the platform pushes into the user’s cloud-based Sentieo Notebook that serves as a light-touch Research Management System (RMS) for organizing and collaborating on research content. Additional content can be pulled in via email and Sentieo’s browser extension webclipper, becoming instantly available in the user’s Sentieo Notebook that is accessible from a user’s desktop, iPad and iPhone apps, and via Sentieo’s Excel Plugin.

“The magic of Sentieo is that it understands and caters to an analyst’s workflow, allowing you to centralize activities previously performed in Excel, Evernote/OneNote, chat, document search, and your financial terminal, all in a single, seamless platform,” said Sentieo CEO Alap Shah.

While working as a hedge fund analyst covering consumer equities at Viking Global Investors and in Citadel’s Global Equities business, CEO Alap Shah realized that existing financial data platforms were unable to keep up with his need to process information about hundreds of companies and positions every day. The seed of Sentieo was planted, resulting in a platform built from the user’s point of view, automating key processes and ensuring timely alerts on key textual and contextual changes in documents and data. Sentieo’s key services have been architected with a user first philosophy by a world-class team of Product Managers with previous Analyst and Portfolio Manager experience at top buy-side shops including Balyasny Asset Management, Pine River Capital Management, Scout Capital, Casablanca Capital, and Citigroup’s prop trading desk, as well as investment banking experience from JPMorgan, Lazard, and Standard Chartered Bank.

Employing the latest in machine learning and predictive analysis, Sentieo’s new Mosaic service stands at the forefront of the growing “Quantamental” investing trend, arming fundamental investors with quant tools to help forecast demand and price movements. By tracking, scrubbing, and visualizing key company/brand data such as website traffic, search volumes, Twitter mentions, app downloads and more, Mosaic allows analysts to correlate web interest to revenue growth and price performance, driving a significant alpha generation edge. Freeing analysts from tedious work in Excel and removing the need for in-house engineers, Mosaic allows funds to track and maximize the benefit from all the valuable datasets they acquire or create.

Sentieo further alters the fintech landscape with a range of unique features, including:

A desktop built for the web and cloud, architected using the most recent web frameworks with no software to download or maintain;
Mobile applications (iPad, iPhone and Android) designed simultaneously with the core desktop platform to offer a full range of services with seamless transitioning and sync across devices;
World class collaboration technology using the Sentieo Notebook, as well as collaboration centralization, reporting and audit for CTOs and compliance officers.
“Sentieo works the way a modern financial platform should. It not only generates better search results faster, it incorporates a broader and more complex combination of financial and real-world datasets to produce a more revealing picture of what’s actually happening in the real world,” said Alap Shah.

To create Sentieo, Alap partnered with his brother, Naman Shah, Sentieo’s president. Previously, Naman developed breakthroughs in low-cost reverse osmosis filtration technology, water delivery networks, and cloud technology as co-founder of Sarvajal, a social enterprise that provides clean drinking water to over 300,000 underserved villagers in India. Together Naman and CTO Rajdeep Singh have built a world-class team of engineers and designers that drive the rapid pace of Sentieo’s product innovation.

“We wanted to take a new approach to a field that isn’t innovating fast enough, and discard all assumptions,” said Naman Shah. “It’s not only about what users want, it’s also about what they don’t yet know they want. By combining institutional quality financial data with the most advanced analytical technology, we built something that is more useful than existing tools and effortlessly intuitive.”

For more information on Sentieo, visit https://www.sentieo.com/.

About Sentieo
Sentieo is a revolutionary equity research platform designed by hedge fund analysts determined to put the user first. Combining traditional and innovative datasets, it increases efficiency and boosts alpha generation for asset managers, investment banks, and corporations. Serving a global customer base, Sentieo has a team of 60 with offices in San Francisco, New York, Florida, and New Delhi, India.

[jetpack_subscription_form title=”Subscribe to the Sentieo Blog” subscribe_text=”If you would like to continually receive content related to topics of interest in the markets, don’t forget to subscribe to the Sentieo Blog so that we can notify you of new posts by e-mail.” subscribe_button=”Sign Me Up”]

– Subscription meal-kit services like Blue Apron, HelloFresh ($RKET), Plated and dozens of other upstarts are changing the way people purchase groceries and are permanently impairing WFM’s traffic. We walk through how we used Sentieo to ballpark the -1.0% to -1.5% annual comp sales headwind from lost traffic.

– In the broader “food at home” space, WFM’s prepared food business is also at risk from the likes of health-focused on-demand players like Sprig and Munchery as well as new on-demand restaurant delivery players like Postmates, Doordash, and Caviar. Prepared food is 20% of WFM revenue at margins significantly higher than company average.

– The disruption by new tech-enabled players and direct competition by lower margin traditional grocers means WFM has to reset margins, potentially much lower.

This is a companion post to walk through our methodology for our post on WFM.

For full transparency, we wanted to go through in detail our math on the subscription meal-kit industry, where all players are unlisted. This is where Mosaic starts to come in handy to estimate real numbers.

Guesstimating Blue Apron as the anchor

The latest delivery number for Blue Apron is 8 million meals/month (more than double the June 2015 rate of 3 million meals/month) That Fortune article equates it to a $960m run rate on an ASP of $10, but we are skeptical as customers never pay the full list price with the myriad referral bonuses and other promotions common in the business. We reckon the real number is closer to $9, which puts Blue Apron on a still-impressive $720m revenue run rate.

Hellofresh as the other end of the vector

Hellofresh’s 2015 pre-IPO numbers were $290m globally, of which 60% is US revenues. That’s $150m for calendar 2015, over which the company quadrupled, so they exited with closer to $375m run rate in US revenues.

Using Mosaic and two known points to triangulate

We don’t know much about Plated and the other smaller players in the subscription kit space, but fortunately, they all run similar business models in the most transparent traffic market in the world. We used Mosaic to pull together three independent reads on Plated’s traffic and got extremely close results:

Using the market share data and known revenue numbers, we can put an estimate on Plated of about $135m in annual run rate:

This sounds in the ballpark considering it was pinned at $100m from this Inc article in June 2015. The closeness of fit of a linear curve shows that the revenues are strongly tied to traffic acquisition, but also that there is no clear barrier to entry or topline benefit to scale:

Getting a Handle on Industry Growth

So we now know that the industry is doing roughly $1.4bn/yr today but that number is meaningless in isolation because the rate of growth presents a constantly moving target, something traditional investors in retail and staples aren’t used to. We need get a handle on growth as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a platform where you could easily pull up that data from multiple sources?

Plated’s March peak in traffic is a one-off bump thanks to their deal with Mark Cuban on Shark Tank, but we reckon that the industry has roughly doubled year-on-year, which means that there was at least $700m in incremental revenues over 2015, backend weighted. What is a reasonable estimate for forward projections?

Forecasting the future is more art than science. If the industry saw 100% growth in 2015, is it fair to say it will grow 100% again in 2016? On the one hand, you are starting off a higher base and are going from early adopters to followers. On the other hand, you have better funding and cash flow and scale in everything from customer base to marketing campaigns to logistics. It is hard to take the over/under. We think a fair conservative estimate is $800m in incremental revenues, which is a slight acceleration year on year in dollar terms but actually a sizable deceleration percentage-wise, to +60% forward growth. We think the risk to this number is higher rather than lower as more funding and entrants like Amazon come into the space.

Calculating the Comp Sensitivity for WFM

1% of WFM’s 2015 revenues of $15bn is $150m, and given that WFM is not closing stores in any meaningful scale, this is a directly applicable number to calculate impact on comparable store sales. Every $150m taken away from WFM is 1% less in comps.

However, WFM does not solely bear the brunt of the disruption. A number of WFM’s peers, from Kroger to Sprouts Farmers Market, have all called out or commented on the potential impact on subscription meal-kit services. While WFM is a major player, it would be unfair to attribute the full amount of the disruption to them. Since WFM is approximately 25% of grocery industry revenues, we think somewhere in that ballpark would be appropriate, though pricing and demographic characteristics make WFM more susceptible to disruption than the general industry.

Taking all of the above into consideration, we are able to stress test a simple model of WFM comp sensitivity to the subscription meal-kit services, which is how we finally arrive at our Comp Sensitivity table used in the main WFM blog post.

Here at Sentieo we’ve been tracking JCP and their Instagram account and see a storm brewing. We will walk through 3 Sentieo products that you’ll wish you knew about sooner, and see how we are able to tie together Mosaic’s Instagram data, Document Search on Broker Research, and Realtime Google tracking to get ahead of the Street’s concerns. Sentieo is a new financial platform that supercharges your research process & returns by combining deep document search, tracking of new web and social datasets and an integrated research notebook into a seamless web + mobile experience.

What is Mosaic?

The truth is, ??? is not so easy. Data is expensive and yet everyone wants to sell it to you, what do you use? Data is messy and unreliable and constantly changing, who do you hire to help you? And once you have it, how do you tie it together and not go crazy?

The way Sentieo helps with ??? is by providing a multifaceted platform that interlinks to serve up pieces that are, together, worth more than the sum of their parts. Let’s walk through how we found, then investigated, a recent case study that is only just starting to get traction on Wall Street, hopping between the various Sentieo products.

About Sentieo

DISCLAIMER

Nothing on this website should be considered investment advice. We do not make recommendations (long or short) in any securities. We do not express opinions as to whether any company's accounting practices are in violation of SEC, GAAP, IFRS or other rules/regulations.